Overcoming Performance, Cost and Energy Issues in Fixed and Mobile Convergent Networks

The Internet traffic is exploding by following an exponential growth. The telecommunication operators are struggling to face such unprecedented phenomenon. The telecommunication networks, especially the access and aggregation networks, need to evolve, and the research community is working hard to develop novel technical solutions that can help in mitigating the performance, cost and energy issues caused by such traffic growth. In this thesis we focus on three of the most promising technologies to achieve this goal: Fixed and Mobile Convergence (FMC), Distributed Content Delivery and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). We investigate benefits and technical challenges arising by their adoption in the access and aggregation segments of the network. We especially show that a joint adoption of FMC, Distributed Content Delivery and NFV principles can consistently help in reducing costs and energy consumption without significantly affecting performance.